


Bursting at the seams

by miabicicletta



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Post episode: 1x08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-23
Updated: 2013-11-23
Packaged: 2018-01-02 09:24:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1055136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miabicicletta/pseuds/miabicicletta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the moment after she says it, he is struck by a sudden, fully-formed regret.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bursting at the seams

"Shines a light?" Her nose scrunches up in skepticism. "That’s no explanation."

In the moment after she says it, he is struck by a sudden, fully-formed regret. It is a self-contained thing; a piercing sort of longing that is jarring in its specificity. For a sparse, single moment, Fitz imagines a reality where he never sterilized the Faraday Cup. A world where she sneezed and instead of destroying her microbial detritus as protocol, bio-ethics and international law demanded, he’d just sent the thing off anyway, launching a hundred thousand or so Jemma-bits out into space. To die, probably. But maybe not. Some, being Jemma-like and naturally drawn to warm, inviting spaces, would find a cozy crevice to tuck themselves into, hiding away from the violence of interstellar winds and the belts of electromagnetic radiation and all manner of brutality that proliferated in the vacuum between worlds.

And maybe, long after the probe had been loosed from its gravitational well, when it's gone up and out and on from the solar system, a million million years or so from now, in some brave new age of the cosmos long after humanity had battered itself out of existence, there would be the slim, protoplastic hope of Jemma Simmons, still shining on. Thriving in the light of a new sun and making some otherwise insignificant, back-corner world the bright center of the whole universe. 

Fitz dismisses it almost right away. He is rational, rule-following. But not before the corner of his mouth turns up, just a fraction, and he delights in a perfect, impossible legacy.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the poem _[My God, it's full of stars](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/243880)_ by Tracy K. Smith. Apparently as I see him, Fitz is a wretched romantic.


End file.
